ERDOS

ERDOS is a platform for developing self-driving cars and robotics applications.

Getting started

The easiest way to get ERDOS running is to use our Docker image:

docker pull erdosproject/erdos

Local installation

System requirements

ERDOS is known to work on Ubuntu 16.04, 18.04, and 19.10.

Installation

git clone https://github.com/erdos-project/erdos.git && cd erdos

python3 python/setup.py develop

This script installs Python and Rust dependencies in addition to ERDOS.

Running an example

python3 python/examples/simple_pipeline.py

Writing Applications

ERDOS provides Python and Rust interfaces for developing applications.

The Python interface provides easy integration with popular libraries such as tensorflow, but comes at the cost of performance (e.g. slower serialization and the lack of multithreading).

The Rust interface provides more safety guarantees (e.g. compile-time type checking) and faster performance (e.g. multithreading and zero-copy message passing). High performance, safety critical applications such as self-driving car pipelines deployed in production should use the Rust API to take full advantage of ERDOS.

ERDOS Design

ERDOS is a streaming dataflow system designed for self-driving car pipelines and robotics applications.

Components of the pipelines are implemented as operators which are connected by data streams. The set of operators and streams forms the dataflow graph, the representation of the pipline that ERDOS processes.

Applications define the dataflow graph by connecting operators to streams in the driver section of the program. Operators are typically implemented elsewhere.

ERDOS is designed for low latency. Self-driving car pipelines require end-to-end deadlines on the order of hundreds of milliseconds for safe driving. Similarly, self-driving cars typically process gigabytes per second of data on small clusters. Therefore, ERDOS is optimized to send small amounts of data (gigabytes as opposed to terabytes) as quickly as possible.

ERDOS provides determinisim through watermarks. Low watermarks are a bound on the age of messages received and operators will ignore any messages older than the most recent watermark received. By processing on watermarks, applications can avoid non-determinism from processing messages out of order.

Getting involved

If you would like to contact us, please send an email to: erdos-developers@googlegroups.com, or create an issue on GitHub.

We always welcome contributions to ERDOS. One way to get started is to pick one of the issues tagged with good first issue -- these are usually good issues that help you familiarize yourself with the ERDOS code base. Please submit contributions using pull requests.